"Bach und Strom" by Ernst Weber and Ernst Liebermann is an illustrated literary anthology written in the early 20th century. It gathers German poems, ballads, and brief tales about brooks and rivers—culminating in the Rhine—mixing nature lyric, folklore, legend, and patriotic song. Drawing on well-known voices and folk motifs, it treats water as a source of labor, wonder, peril, and national identity.The opening of the anthology sets a lyrical proem to the “German stream” and then flows through short poems that personify brooks and waves, chart a young stream’s course, and reflect on life’s destiny and hope. It shifts to mill life with a comic trick on a miller and a vivid village memoir of running a hidden mill and flushing out a flour-thief, before turning to fish, dragonflies, and water-spirits in witty and eerie ballads (ferryman and Death, teasing nixies, and flood vengeance). The focus broadens to travel and devotion on the water, then to the Rhine: its stark source, vine-clad banks, castles, cathedrals, warnings of its seductive charm, and rousing patriotic verses. Legendary pieces follow—Bishop Hatto and the Mäuseturm, Heine’s Lorelei and a prose Lurlei tale—leading into Nibelungen scenes that rise toward the treacherous slaying of Siegfried, where the excerpt breaks off. (This is an automatically generated summary.)
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